London-based Ethos raised a $22.75 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from General Catalyst, XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic, the company announced on May 6. The round brings total funding to approximately $30 million following a $3.25 million seed led by General Catalyst in 2024, according to Tech.eu.
What Ethos Does
Ethos uses voice-powered AI agents to onboard experts and match them with enterprise clients who need specialized talent for consulting and full-time roles. The platform competes with legacy expert networks like GLG, Third Bridge, and AlphaSights by replacing form-based job-title matching with conversational AI interviews that extract deeper capability signals.
The AI agent conducts voice interviews, then cross-references responses against public sources including academic papers, GitHub repositories, and professional content to build what the company calls a richer expertise profile. Clients can run natural-language queries like “find me people who worked at a funded startup by A-grade investors solving for finance automation,” according to TechCrunch.
“A CV is a poor proxy for what someone is truly capable of,” CEO James Lo told Tech.eu. “AI is reshaping the labour market faster than our tools for valuing human expertise can keep up.”
Founding Team
Lo previously worked at McKinsey and SoftBank Vision Fund, where he was involved in portfolio company transformations at WeWork and Arm, TechCrunch reported. CTO Daniel Mankowitz spent six years at Google DeepMind, contributing to YouTube’s video compression algorithm, Gemini, and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm.
a16z partner Anish Acharya told TechCrunch that legacy platforms like LinkedIn and GLG only capture “shallow signals with job titles,” while Ethos captures sub-specializations through its voice interview process.
Traction and Revenue
Ethos reported onboarding more than 5,000 candidates per week across accounting, banking, consulting, law, technology, healthcare, and skilled trades, according to Tech.eu. TechCrunch reported a higher figure of 35,000 experts per week. The company takes a 30% or higher per-project fee from businesses and said it is on track for “eight-figure annualized revenue,” though it did not provide specific numbers, per TechCrunch.
Vertical Agent Funding Continues
The round adds to a pattern of agent-specific vertical platforms raising Series A capital in 2026. Where horizontal agent frameworks compete on breadth, Ethos is betting that domain-specific matching, powered by voice AI rather than text forms, can capture a market that traditional recruiting platforms have underserved. The funding will go toward developing the AI agent platform and expanding partnerships with AI labs and enterprise clients.